Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man

government driven above all to establish a unified independent Korean state. The People’s Republic captured the aspirations of Koreans throughout the countryside, particularly of peasants who had borne the brunt of Japanese colonial policies. In the weeks and months after liberation, the work of building a new nation was animated through “people’s committees” that proliferated in the rural south. These were locally administered, grassroots organizations that infused anticolonial patriotism with concrete goals such as land redistribution and the purging of colonial collaborators from the police and other government posts. Their radicalism alarmed U.S. authorities. After the People’s Republic boldly called forth a national election to unify the country, Maj. Gen. Archibald Arnold, the military governor of Seoul, warned, “There is only one Government in Korea south of the 38 degrees. For any man or group to call an election as proposed is the most serious interference with the Military Government” and constitutes “an act of open opposition” to the United States that would not be taken lightly.⁷

      This “open opposition” continued as the majority of Koreans realized that the United States had come not to liberate them—that is, to help them reconstruct society from the ground up—but to ensure the continuation of the established colonial order. Within a week of Hodge’s arrival, the State Department had identified “several hundred conservatives” who officials believed could be entrusted to lead South Korea.⁸ They were landowning elites who had profited on the backs of peasants during the colonial period, and exactly the kinds of “collaborators” and “feudalistic” legacies that the people’s committees sought to purge. In addition, the Military Government revived the colonial National Police, a much-hated symbol of Japanese oppression, as its instrument for suppressing radical activities. Koreans who remained in Allied Occupied Japan also saw a return to business-as-usual. In a petition to General MacArthur in May 1946, three Koreans alleged that Japanese police violence against Koreans had escalated since the occupation. “We, Koreans, have welcomed [the] Allied Forces as the army of emancipation with maximum respect and affection,” they prefaced their grievance, “[h]owever, to our great regret, the Japanese police has begun again to intervene, suppress and behave violently…. And we cannot understand that they do so by agreement with Allied Forces, as they propagate.”⁹

      According to Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) officials, the retention and expansion of the Japanese police force in the first year of the Allied Occupation of Japan was a matter of “necessity” due to the “adverse rate” of replacements and “acute shortage” of American troops.¹⁰ Still, authorities could not ignore these allegations. They responded by digging into the political pasts of the petitioners. Upon investigation, agents of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Tokyo found that Chun Hai Kim, the “principle instigator” of the petition, was a member of the Japanese Communist Party and had a lengthy police record, including a homicide conviction. As for the claim of police abuse against Koreans, their closer look into some of these cases revealed “not cases of actual persecution” but of “Korean resistance to Japanese Police attempting to maintain order.” Having fully discredited the petition, the agents took it one step further: “It is evident that the Allied Council and the Occupation Authorities are going to be bombarded with a series of such petitions, designed to create the impression that these statements are representative of popular opinion or expressions of bona fide groups of citizens.” What they actually represented, however, was the “classical approach” of communists to “mislea[d] [and] exaggerat[e]” the facts, “and plainly designed to strengthen the Communist Party,” in Japan and elsewhere “in the Orient.”¹¹

      Officials’ interpretation of local anticolonial grievances as strategies of a global communist crusade reflected more than paranoia; it indicated how the United States would come to criminalize recalcitrant colonial subjects. In the Philippines, for example, the Hukbalahaps, an anti-Japanese guerrilla force during the war, became an “internal security” threat promptly after liberation because it continued to rally peasants against corrupt landlords and colonial elites who maintained power.¹² In Okinawa, longstanding indigenous struggles against Japanese land policies were cast as the work of saboteurs to undermine the U.S. occupation and its plans to build military bases. “The pattern of the disturbance planned for the U.S. bases throughout Okinawa island,” according to the 441^st Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment in 1947, “will most probably take the form of a revolt by violence, following the line of strategy and tactics adopted in struggles in colonies throughout the world.”¹³ Throughout the post–World War II Pacific, anticolonial movements thus intensified in Central Luzon, Okinawa, Taegu, Cheju, and other locales, fueled by the re-entrenchment of colonial class relations and the violent suppression of worker and peasant revolts in the name of anticommunism.

      The crisis of legitimacy that confronted U.S. officials in Asia would deepen as they revived the structures of the colonial state to make the region stable for capitalism. In Korea, Hodge understood the crisis and observed to the Secretary of State that, in the eyes of Koreans, “[t]he word pro-American is being added to pro-Jap, national traitor, and collaborator.”¹⁴ His solution for dealing with this “anti-Americanism,” however, proved misguided entirely. “One of the principle factors adverse to Korean-American relationship in South Korea,” he noted to the commanding generals of the U.S. Army Forces in Korea, “is a plain, unvarnished lack of courtesy” for Koreans by American soldiers. “I see evidences of this everyday,” of Americans “mak[ing] fun of the Koreans, calling them ‘gooks.’” Lest Americans be construed by Koreans as another colonizer with wanton disregard for their lives, the command should “effect spot checks on conduct and prompt handling of offenders.”¹⁵

      If Hodge thought that curbing the racial prejudices and “discourtesies” of American soldiers could placate Koreans and win their allegiance, he gravely misjudged the depth of their anticolonial aspirations, and failed to see how race played a far more important role in legitimating the U.S. occupation. From the start, Americans routinely characterized Koreans as a simple-minded people, with “few ideas” beyond a deep hatred for the Japanese and desire for immediate independence.¹⁶ According to the State Department’s political adviser, William Langdon, this was a main explanation for the Autumn Uprisings, a massive revolt in the fall of 1946 that shook the American occupied zone. He argued that the revolt exposed once and for all the Koreans’ “latent savagery and incapacity for self-government.” Langdon blamed the uprisings on the Koreans as well as the Japanese, whose authoritarianism taught Koreans “to only respect force,” hence the reason why they “now submit meekly to a dictatorial alien controlled regime in North Korea.”¹⁷ What was once the Japanese empire’s “Korean problem” (that of “uncivilized” colonial subjects within the body politic) had turned quickly into a communist problem for the U.S. Military Government. The task at hand, U.S. officials understood, entailed “teach[ing] the responsibilities [and] advantages of democracy” to Koreans and steering them clear away from communism.¹⁸

      These dual projects—of civilizing Koreans and suppressing their radicalism—cohered in an experiment that Americans had tested long ago in a different colonial setting in the Philippines: to instill martial discipline in the population and to build up an indigenous security force. This process began with the arrival of Lt. Col. Russell D. Barros in September 1945 as part of the XXIV Corps. Barros was an officer in the Philippine Army who had mobilized a band of Filipino guerrillas as part of the liberation of Luzon in 1944, and who was prized for his experience working with Asian soldiers.¹⁹ His travel from one U.S. colonial outpost to another, and the knowledge he acquired and implemented along the way, exemplified the kinds of transnational circuits that would shape the U.S. military empire in Asia over the next two decades. With Barros’s guidance and with SCAP approval, Hodge directed the formation of a Korean Constabulary in January 1946, which served as an auxiliary to the National Police, with infantry units established at each province.²⁰ Similar to the one formed at the start of the U.S. colonial rule of the Philippines, the Korean Constabulary was tasked with maintaining “internal security” of the liberated colony in order “to get a start for the future” when a viable government was established.²¹

      In the early months of 1946, young Korean men flocked to the recruiting stations, heeding the calls of newspaper ads